There was something reassuring about Trevor – and likewise Elliot. Something about their calm, measured personalities that made Emilia feel secure. Even so, after Ottilie and Trevor left that night, she took heed of her father-in-law’s words and double-locked all the doors.
Her mobile springs into life on her desk and Emilia’s stomach swoops. She snatches up the phone.
‘Okay. I admit it. It works,’ says Hannah, without any preamble, as is her way.
Emilia exhales with relief as she moves a pile of papers from her chair so that she can sit down, her mobile balancing between chin and shoulder. ‘So you’re happy for me to keep it in?’
‘It’s your book. As long as you know there’s no coming back from this. Once Miranda is killed off you can’t have a resurrection in a later book. That’s it for the series. But at least she’ll go out with a bang.’
Emilia leans back in her chair and stares out of the dormer window into the garden. From here she can see the shadowy form of Elliot moving around his insulated outside office. Can she really do this? But she’s thirty-eight years old: she’s been careful with her money and knows she can survive if her career takes a nose dive. ‘It feels like the right thing to do,’ she admits. ‘Time to move on. I want to write about something else. Something different. I’ll miss Miranda, but –’
‘It’s an emotional ending,’ interjects Hannah. ‘Her death. It affected me.’
‘Oh. That’s good.’ Emilia feels a tug on her heart. She’d cried when she wrote that final chapter with Miranda’s death, the first time she’d ever cried at anything she’d written. But Miranda had been everything she wished she was, and when she killed her off she felt like a part of her had died too.
She glances around at her framed book jackets, adorning the dusky pink walls of her office, feeling a sense of accomplishment even if it is tinged with worry and guilt. She reassures herself that it’s done now: the story has taken on a life of its own and there is no going back. She always feels at a loose end when she submits a book, not quite ready to start another, her last story still hanging over her, like a recent dream she can’t quite shake off. She already misses Miranda and the doubt sets in. What if she’s making a huge mistake?
‘I’ll get the edits back as soon as. There’s not much to do, it’s already very fully formed. Well done, Emilia. It’s very clever. I’m impressed.’
A wave of guilt washes over Emilia. If only Hannah knew the truth.
8
Emilia takes the box with the decapitated seagull inside and closes the door to her office firmly behind her. It’s right at the top of the house, in the converted attic and next to the guest bedroom. She watches a pigeon walking across the large Velux window, its feet tapping against the glass. She makes her way down the narrow staircase that leads onto the main landing, and when she’s reached the kitchen on the ground floor she throws the seagull into the bin, wondering why she hadn’t done so as soon as she’d received it.
She makes Elliot an instant coffee, slips on her coat and shoes, and crosses the frost-coated lawn to his garden office. They’d built it in the middle of the first lockdown so that Elliot had somewhere quiet to work （even though he now goes into the central London office three times a week）。 It always smells of wood and electrical equipment and, unlike her office, is meticulously tidy. There is a photo on his desk of the two of them on their wedding day and another with the four of them on a trip to Land’s End when Wilfie was only four. They are all pulling silly faces and pointing at the sign and it always makes her heart lift. When she first started dating Elliot he wasn’t put off that she already had a four-year-old daughter, as she’d thought he might be, and treated Jasmine like his own.
As she walks in now, he looks up, handsome in a black ribbed polo-neck jumper. His dark wavy hair needs cutting and stands on end as if he’s been raking his hands through it. He has his reading glasses on; they make him look like Patrick Dempsey. ‘Thanks, beauty,’ he says, smiling, as she hands him the coffee in his favourite Super Dad cup, which Wilfie had given him for Father’s Day last year. He takes a long gulp and sets it down. It always amazes her that he can drink liquids when they’re still piping hot.
She tells him about her conversation with Hannah and his face lights up. ‘So that’s it. The end of Miranda?’
‘It looks that way. I have no idea what I’m going to write next but I’m excited it will be something different.’
‘At least you’ve got a bit of time off now. When am I allowed to read it?’
‘After I get it back from Hannah. So not yet.’ Anxiety washes over her every time she thinks back to last year and how hard the book had been to write. She pushes the uneasiness away and changes the subject. ‘What are you working on?’ She moves so she’s standing at his shoulder and peers at his computer screens concertinaed in front of him. He puts his arm around her waist. He has three screens set up with different images on each. He’s a brilliant artist, inherited from Trevor, and it’s been passed down to Wilf.
‘Packaging. Which one do you prefer?’
She looks at all three cereal packets, each varying in colours and fonts. ‘This one,’ she says, pointing to the left. ‘I like the orange.’
He gives her waist a little squeeze. ‘That’s my favourite too, although it’ll be up to the client. Now go. I need to get on. Just because you’ve got nothing to do now your book’s in,’ he teases. She bends down to kiss him, then heads back into the house. It feels large and empty: she prefers it when it’s full, like it was on Sunday night, with the kids and in-laws and friends. Her parents’ house was always so quiet. Her father was in the RAF so they moved around a lot, but when she went home to wherever they were living （and it varied from Scotland to Cornwall） they never seemed to have anyone around, no family or cousins, aunts and uncles. Most of the time she’d hated boarding school, the only light being Ottilie, but it was still preferable to being at home with a mother who always seemed disappointed with her lot, and a father who tried to blend in with the furniture.
Emilia grabs her bag. She’s got a few hours before she needs to pick up Wilfie but Jasmine is going to her friend’s house after school and won’t be home until after dinner. She’ll wander into Richmond, have a look around the shops. Wilfie is in need of more school shirts after a recent growth spurt. Even though Elliot is in the garden she locks the front porch for once, remembering Trevor’s words. She wraps her coat around herself and pulls up her hood when she feels light rain.
As she’s making her way down the hill her phone vibrates in her coat pocket. It’s a text from Louise: Still okay for tomorrow night? It’s been ages!
She taps a message back as she’s walking: Can’t wait! Same time and place?
Louise pings back a reply: Yes! Soooo looking forward to seeing you.
Emilia is smiling as she slips the phone back into her pocket. Louise is a few years younger, but as soon as she had sat down next to Emilia, on that first coffee morning, blowing her dark fringe off her heart-shaped face, and joked, ‘Fuck, what a first day! Is it too early for a gin and tonic?’ she’d known she would like her. In her baggy jeans and oversized sweatshirt with a Scottie on the front, she was a breath of fresh air after some of the Breton-wearing mums she had met: they only talked about problems with their nannies, wearing their entitlement like a favourite scarf. She had never fitted in with them, as if they knew she was an imposter despite the accent she had picked up at school.